Split ticketing

Okay, so you may be quite savvy with our best fare finder widget. You may know all about booking up to twelve weeks in advance to get the best prices. You might even know that upgrading to first class in advance can still be cheaper than buying a standard class ticket on the day. But did you know that by splitting your journey into its component parts (i.e. instead of buying one ticket direct from London to Edinburgh you buy four tickets from London to Preston to Carlisle to Edinburgh) can actually be considerably cheaper?

Of course, nothing in life is that easy and so there is a degree of compromise needed. Splitting your ticket means you must be on the specific train you booked for time wise. If you are on a journey that requires you to change trains and your first train is late causing you to miss your connection, the ticket you have will not cover a later train. Meaning you will need to buy another ticket for the rest of your journey.

Similarly, off-peak and super off-peak tickets require you to travel at specific times of the day. If you split your ticket at a station where you are required to change and there is a delay and that delay takes you outside of the off-peak time, then most probably need to buy another ticket for the rest of your journey.

So there is a certain amount of risk involved, but who said saving money was easy. Well, we did actually. Because for all the journeys that need a train change, there are the ones that don't. So long as you split your ticket and the train you're on stops at all the stops you have split it at, you can stay on the train the entire time and take full advantage of the savings made by breaking your journey down.

A few things to reiterate before using our best fare finder widget to see whether split ticketing works for you:

The train must stop at all the stations you are breaking your journey at (you don't have to get off but it must be possible to).

If you split your ticket at a station where you are changing trains and the first leg of your journey is running late, then you will probably have to buy an extra ticket for a later train as your tickets are time specific.

You can split tickets on singles and returns.

If you are making a long journey and the first part is in peak time, try making the split after the rush hour to minimise the expense.

As with most things that will save you money, a little bit of leg work is involved so put some time aside to work out where your train stops at and use our best fare finder to ascertain whether it will indeed be cheaper to split the ticket. Slightly time consuming yes, but you can literally save hundreds if this is done correctly so well worth the effort, we think you'd agree.